Karen Horne: Night and Day

In his 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” Charles Baudelaire stated that ‘modernity’ required, “above all a man of the world to fulfill. He has every-where sought after the fugitive, fleeting beauty of present-day life, the distinguishing character of that quality which, with the reader’s kind permission, we have called ‘modernity’. Often weird, violent and excessive, he has contrived to concentrate in his drawings the acrid or heady bouquet of the wine of life.” If we are to seek for such a representation of ‘modernity’ in Salt Lake City, of that which captures the “fugitive, fleeting beauty of present-day life,” we need look no further than the art of Karen Horne, painter of Salt Lake City . . .